At least four of the 19 Orthodox converts whom the Interior Ministry had previously denied citizenship this week received their Israeli identity cards, mere days after the ministry announced a change in its policy regarding whom to consult about the validity of Orthodox conversions.

Thomas Dohlan, 24, an Orthodox convert from Canada whose battles with the Interior Ministry over the past few months had been highly publicized, was one of the four to receive an identity card this week.

Yesterday [Rabbi Seth Farber, head of Itim] submitted a request for a two-month delay in the court case to see if all the other cases are resolved, he added.

"We're hopeful that in two months we'll be able to withdraw our case completely. We're now meeting with our clients, one by one, and have them go to the Interior Ministry to see if their cases are resolved."

Rabbi Farber said he is happy with the new agreement except for the inclusion of what he called an “exit clause” that permits the Chief Rabbinate to intervene should a case arise in which there is doubt about the authenticity of the conversion.

“The agreement does not say who raises such doubts, only that the Interior Ministry has to go to the Chief Rabbinate,” he said.

“I’ve been assured the Chief Rabbinate will not use this [clause]. Since they acknowledge the Chief Rabbinate has no jurisdiction over this issue, why is it even involved at all?”

“Conversion has legal ramifications, unlike the US where it doesn't. You can't let anyone who wants to convert to do so, since that enables them to enter the country and receive citizenship, or change the status of an alien to legal.

You must reach clear, legal norms. The body that torpedoed the issue was the Chief Rabbinate, who decided to not accept the committee's findings. Today they are penitent,” he said wryly.

Professor Dov Maimon (modern Orthodox think-tanker) ... proposed the introduction of a new form of conversion that he called “civilizational conversion,” in which one would seek membership in the religious community of the Jewish people, but without necessarily committing oneself to observe the Orthodox commandments, as Orthodox conversion now requires.

This sort of reframed the discussion. He had few details — it’s apparently still an idea in infancy — but we’re going to hear more about it in months to come, you betcha.

Sharansky then said that “the fact that Yishai came, and agreed to sit at the table with us, is a great achievement.”

This rings especially true since the current round-table on conversion – formed and led by Sharansky and Cabinet Secretary Zvi Hauser in the wake of the maelstrom around Rotem’s conversion bill last summer – has no haredi representative, from neither Shas nor United Torah Judaism, though a representative from Yishai’s Interior Ministry is said to be a staunch delegate of the minister’s weltanschauung.

Yishai, who has never attempted to conceal his contempt for non-Orthodox forms of Judaism, would like to reinstate the status of “Jew” on Israeli identity cards – but only for those whom he and other Orthodox Jews consider to be “Jews.”

If Yishai has his way, Reform and Conservative converts to Judaism will not be recognized as Jewish on new ID cards.

Not only is this move an affront to millions of Reform and Conservative Jews in the Diaspora, it is also in violation of the spirit of a High Court ruling dating back a decade.

...Yishai’s meddling can only arouse unnecessary tension between Israel and the Diaspora.

The World Zionist Organization on Friday urged the government not to reinstate a clause that formerly appeared in Israeli identification cards specifying the holder’s religion.

Gathering in Jerusalem for its annual meeting, the Zionist organization’s governing committee easily passed the resolution against the opposition of delegates from the Likud and Shas parties criticizing the government’s recent decision.

“We believe such an act will sow discord among the Jewish people and we oppose the proposed change,” said delegates from the Masorti (Conservative) Movement, who voted in favor of the motion.

It would be best, then, if [Yishai] immediately returned the issue back to the shelf from which it was pulled.

An individual's identity does not require political approval. His beliefs are his own private business, and his sense of national belonging is determined by his own identification, not by the order of the interior minister.

Rabbi Israel Rosen, the founder and head of the Tzomet organization, on Wednesday welcomed Interior Minister Eli Yishai's decision to return the nationality descriptor 'Jewish' to Israeli ID cards, saying 'nationality' alone has no meaning when making halachic determinations of 'Jewishness.'

The Movement for Progressive Judaism says the move therefore acts against the interests of many converted Reform and Conservative Jews.

"This would trample not only the rights of our converts but also a very clear ruling by the Supreme Court," said the movement's chairman, Rabbi Gilad Kariv.

"I strongly hope the prime minister, who last year showed such determination to prevent a rift in the Jewish people around the conversion law, will take swift action to prevent a foolish and unnecessary controversy before we are forced to appeal to the High Court."

“Instead of embracing the converts, Yishai is humiliating them. Most of the Jewish peopleare Reform and Conservative, but a fundamentalist haredi minority is making Israel look bad, just when it needs the Jewish people more than ever,” Hess said.

Interior ministry spokesman Roi Lahmanovich told Haaretz that "there are Holocaust survivors who want the nationality clause, and those who lost their IDs and ask why they can't leave in the word 'Jewish'."

"The situation in Israel is problematic not only with regard to same-sex couples, but also couples in general who cannot get married here because there is no civil marriage in Israel.

In New York or in any other state, there is a basis for civil marriage," [MK Nitzan] Horowitz (Meretz) said, adding: "Citizens cannot fulfill a basic right in their own country, and that is a much bigger problem than the gay community."

The Knesset on Wednesday rejected a bill calling for public transportation on Shabbat following a heated discussion. Thirty-six lawmakers voted against the proposal, submitted by Knesset Member Nitzan Horowitz (Meretz), and only seven supported it.

But in spite of the ban on public transportation on Shabbat, it turns out that local initiatives have managed to change the status quo.

On Tuesday, the Holon Municipality announced its plan to operate a special bus to Tel Aviv in order to help young party goers. The new line will leave for Tel Aviv on Friday nights every 30 minutes, from 11 pm to 1 am, and will return to Holon from 1 to 4 am.

The new transportation reform in central Israel, to go into effect July 1, will mean that buses that up until now were allowed to travel shortly before the Shabbat ends will no longer be able to do so.

The change, which was not mentioned in the Transportation Ministry announcements ahead of the change, will mean that at least four major routes will only resume their operations shortly after the Shabbat ends instead of a few hours before.

Unfortunately, the focus on loyalty and on the right to criticize and dissent has created an atmosphere of fear, and this in turn has made too many of our community leaders reluctant to place these critical issues squarely before the communities they lead.

Professionals and students from across Israel, and around the world, gathered in Tel Aviv on Monday night for the first annual “Hilleluyah,” to celebrate the work of Hillel Israel, the Israeli division of the world’s largest Jewish campus organization.

Hillel Milo was presented with the first-ever Hillel Israel award for his contributions to the Jewish-Israeli community – most notably for the 1977 establishment of Kolot, a pluralist beit midrash for Jewish studies, and Zehut Le’Chaim, in 2003.

The writer is director of communications for the Jewish Agency and the former Jewish World correspondent for The Jerusalem Post.

At the Jewish Agency, we are not seeking the bureaucratic efficiencies that will bring another 200 olim.

We are seeking a transformation of Jewish life, an engine that can reverse the trend of young American Jewish “distancing” from Israel and Jewish life, and transform aliya from a marginal phenomenon to a central pillar of the western Jewish experience.

The writer is deputy chairman of the World Zionist Organization and a member of the Jewish Agency Executive.

...the Jewish Agency has changed both its focus and its modus operandi. We are investing more in developing a spiral of Israel experiences that will encourage participants to make repeat visits of ever-increasing length.

We are devising innovative programs for those in between visits to nurture the seeds of devotion that germinate in each. We are creating frameworks for social activism involving Jews from abroad and their idealistic counterparts here so that together they might change the world and shape the Jewish state in a manner that gives expression to their values and vision.

In short, we are educating, not selling, with the expectation that the array of experiences we are offering will lead people to make Israel their home on their own.

Today, we desperately need a global Jewish pro-Israel caucus which could emerge from a reformed JAFI.

...The principal objective of a reformed JAFI must be the reconstruction of an unashamedly pro-Israel Jewish leadership in Diaspora communities, including within the American federations, Hillel and rabbinical bodies.

It should endeavor to ensure that only those willing to publicly support the right of Israel to defend itself will be elected to communal leadership roles.

It is good to know that even those who have a strong urge to taunt Zionism, understand from time to time that if they wish to remain here, they need a Zionist state so they will have somewhere to live and something to provoke.

Michael Jankelowitz, one of the Jewish Agency's "best spokesmen ever," according to chairman Natan Sharansky, is leaving the organization, after 33 years working there in different positions, most recently as spokesman to the foreign press.

To see Israel as it is can be disillusioning. The struggle is to keep looking.

Which is exactly what Birthright seems to be afraid of. Programs such as this, rather than widening the eyes of their participants, put on blinders and send them back home knowing Israel through Goldstar and humous.

The Israel that students see on Birthright is still the Israel of the past – but with much better shopping. They are carefully, and unfortunately, kept out of the Israel of today.

James Tisch, the new chairman of the board of governors of the Jewish Agency, and one of the wealthiest and most influential businessmen in the United States.

The Tisch family is profoundly involved in philanthropic activity - in education, Jewish causes, medicine and other areas … In Israel, too, the family funded the construction of the new Biblical Zoo in Jerusalem in 1993, and it is named for them.

...The proceeds from the gala event in Tisch's honor next week will be donated to Jewish Agency programs for children at risk in Israel. Those invitees include businessmen and representatives of Israeli business firms who have agreed to donate $5,000 to $25,000 to the project.

Although most Knesset members would be likely to back the bill, there is little chance it will pass, due to a clause in the current coalition agreement allowing any faction in the coalition to veto a change to a Basic Law. The Deri Law would require amendments to both Basic Law: The Knesset and Basic Law: The Government.

“There isn’t much we can do other than bring it to a vote and put pressure” on the parties in the coalition, Levine said. “There is no justification for a veto. It’s unclear to me how anyone can defend such a stance.”

MKs Tzipi Hotovely and Yariv Levin (Likud), Marina Solodkin (Kadima) and Shelly Yacimovich (Labor) have banded together in a bill saying that any man convicted of an offence carrying moral turpitude and who served one year or more in jail – as Deri has – would be banned from national politics for life.

Deri, and not Yishai, had an opportunity to mingle with international guests, public figures and intellectuals, senior representatives of the world Jewry, while Yishai was criticized at the [Israeli Presidential] Conference by Jewish leaders from around the world for pushing to restore the inclusion of nationality on identity cards.

Q. You shook up the Shas Party when you called on those who are not destined to be great Torah scholars, and who have families to support, to work and not live on ‘shameful’ government allotments.

Why has your message inspired an outpouring of grass-roots support?

A. It hurts me to see 10,000 people who embrace…a lifestyle based on the good intention to learn Torah [but who] at the end of the day will not reach such a high place in Torah learning and they will live in poverty.

They think they do a great thing...but…the reality is that perhaps they are not doing a great thing.

At the cabinet meeting on Sunday, the ministers discussed the cottage cheese issue, until PM Netanyahu said "Look at how many problems there were in the media market, and Minister *Kahlon solved them all. All of you should be Kahlons, too - find solutions!"

[*Minister of Communications/Minister of Welfare and Social Services Moshe Kahlon (Likud)]

Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Benny Gantz yesterday appointed Maj. Gen. (res. ) Yishai Be'er head of a team charged with examining the Yizkor prayer said at military memorial ceremonies for Israel's fallen soldiers.

Be'er retired from the IDF more than a year ago. A law professor, he graduated from the Jerusalem high school yeshiva Netiv Meir and is dean of the law faculty at the Interdisciplinary Center in Herzliya.

Every time religiosity comes from a place of force, we get burned in the end. I certainly wouldn't fight over this.

Take Tisha B'Av for example. The memorial day for the destruction of the Temple has a religious protocol only, and in practice it doesn't interest secular people. There's a danger that this can happen with us too, perhaps not today, but please God, in the future when there is peace. We know how the Americans treat their Memorial Day. There it's basically a day for shopping.

We want to mobilize the entire nation in the effort to remember the IDF's fallen soldiers and not leave it in the small domain of the religious.

"May God remember his sons and daughters" is a hair-raising messianic formula. Making it the obligatory wording of the official Yizkor memorial prayer is a true revolution, one that alters the IDF's very essence: It has now become the Israel Divine Offense Forces.

The writer teaches political science at the Ariel University Center of Samaria.

Unfortunately, in an era when most of the fighters come from another place in society - from a close connection to Jewish tradition, from settlements and yeshivas - the version of Yizkor has been adapted, unpleasant as it is to say, to those for whom the prayer might be said.

The argument over the wording of the IDF’s memorial prayer has gone up a notch, with over 40,000 people signing an online petition by Monday night calling on Chief of Staff Lt.-Gen. Benny Gantz to revert to the original version that gives no mention to God.

It was to be expected that, over the years, mirroring developments in the daily life of the Jewish state and its army, the powers-that-be would introduce more religious content in texts intended to be stately and ceremonial, even if they're secular. This was inherent in the nature of the "Jewish and democratic state" and its language, Hebrew.

C'tee head: Plan to cut IDF service must be implemented/ yeshiva students and religious girls

Knesset Member Moshe Gafni (United Torah Judaism) said Sunday that he is in favor of drafting haredim into the Israel Defense Forces, as long as each student leaving his yeshiva will be replaced by a young secular studying Torah from morning to night.

According to Gafni, the State must recognize haredi education as education for all intents and purposes, and force employers to hire people based on their Torah education.

In her career as a U.S. college player, it hasn’t bothered officials that Shafir wears a T-shirt underneath her sleeveless jersey, covering her shoulders in order to maintain her personal level of modesty.

But playing as a member of the Israeli national team, she was told that international basketball regulations require uniforms to be uniform.

From attacks with metal clubs to setting fire to a home, another red line has been crossed in the war between rival ultra-Orthodox groups in Jerusalem's Warsaw Homes (Batei Warsaw ) neighborhood.

Eida Haredit zealots hired a lawyer and are preparing to appeal this month to the Israeli courts, which they do not officially recognize, in an attempt to overcome their rivals, members of the community of Gur Hasidim.

Rabbis from the Eida Haredit permitted representatives of the residents to seek the assistance of the Zionist state in an indication of just how desperate this violent battle has become - a battle in which nothing is sacred anymore.

The number of births among ultra-Orthodox women has dropped by 15 percent - from a 7.6 average per woman to 6.5 in the past decade...

The plunge may be associated with the drastic slash in child allowances in 2003. But economic and ideological changes in the ultra-Orthodox world could also have affected the birth rate.

For example, the ultra-Orthodox community has grown considerably and members are now more likely to join the labor force. In addition, growing numbers of women are working, which could lead to lower birth rates.

Lithuanian-Orthodox religious leader Yosef Shalom Elyashiv is expected to be released from the hospital this week after undergoing catheterization in a major artery at Jerusalem's Shaare Zedek Medical Center on Sunday night. The medical team.

Cleveland Clinic surgeon Dr. Daniel Clair, chairman of the Clinic's Department of Vascular Surgery, flew nearly 6,000 miles to operate on the rabbi, who is the highest profile leader of the Lithuanian stream of Ultra-Orthodox Judaism.

Haredi riots aimed at preventing civilian traffic on Rehov Hanevi’im reached a new height on Saturday afternoon, when over a hundred men of various sects tried to scare secular residents into steering clear of the Jerusalem thoroughfare, shouting “Shabbes,” pelting cars with stones and spitting on passersby.

Chief Ashkenazi Rabbi Yona Metzger will be saying kaddish for Jonathan Pollard's father, a religious duty the imprisoned agent cannot fulfill since that prayer needs a quorum of Jewish men, the rabbi announced on Tuesday.

Fans of famed composer and singer Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach may wonder why his daughter Neshama is touring Israel backed up by a Baptist choir, but the singer says she is in a way following in her father's footsteps.

Don’t be surprised ifthe nextMatisyahu album has a decidedly Israeli bent to it.

The American hassidic reggae rocker recently spent time here recording songs with such eclectic collaborators as the klezmer meets-techno stew of Balkan Beat Box, the African Jewish roots music of Yemen Blues and street hip hop of Shyne, the infamous US rapper who’s relocated to Israel.

An archaeological site dedicated in Jerusalem this week consists of a section of an ancient wall built by King Solomon in the 10th century B.C.E., says the archaeologist who dug up the wall. Other archaeologists, however, disagree with the date and implications and object to what they call the political use of archaeology.

The Ophel City Wall site – a complex of buildings uncovered along the route of the fortifications from the First Temple period (tenth-sixth centuries BCE), and the display of the earliest written document ever uncovered in Jerusalem – was inaugurated in a festive ceremony Tuesday.

Industry sources say that traditionally the cost of production is higher at an Israeli dairy than at dairies elsewhere in the world. They blame Israeli kashrut, which raises the cost of the technological systems and means that the Israeli dairy operates only five and a half days a week.

Rebecca Steinfeld is a doctoral candidate in politics at Oxford, where she is writing her dissertation, War of the Wombs: The History and Politics of Fertility Policies in Israel, 1948-2010.

...there has been significant pressure on Israeli Jewish women to increase their fertility to ensure a Jewish majority through internal population growth, to render their wombs a national womb, or rechem leumi.

...Overall though, cultural and religious values have combined with political and demographic concerns to create an atmosphere in which having children is considered not only a basic individual right, but also a national duty.

War of the Wombs: The History and Politics of Fertility Policies in Israel

More than a dozen graves at the Mount of Olives cemetery in Jerusalem were vandalized, the latest in a series of attacks on one of Judaism's oldest cemeteries.

On June 14, some 14 graves were damaged by Arab youths wielding sledgehammers, according to private security guards stationed at the iconic cemetery located in eastern Jerusalem. At least five of the damaged gravesites are those of Americans buried in the cemetery, according to Rabbi Moshe Bezalel Buzokovsky of the Chevra Kadisha.

Off the track beaten by most Holy Land tourists lies one of the richest archaeological sites in a country full of them: the walled port of Acre, where the busy alleys of an Ottoman-era town cover a uniquely intact Crusader city now being rediscovered.